Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York

CONTENTS

Epigraph

Map of Greater New York

Introduction

PART 1

UNDER WATER, 1609–1789

1 Entrepôt

2 George Washington Stepped Here

PART 2

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, 1790–1920

3 The Reticulation

4 Adventures in Drainage

5 The Revenge of Thomas Dongan

6 The Open Loop

7 The Exploding Metropolis

8 Two-Dimensional Gotham

PART 3

NIGHT COMES TO THE MARSHES, 1900–1980

9 The Road to Hermitville

10 The Landscapers of Queens

11 The Wilds of Staten Island

12 The Massifs of Fresh Kills

13 The Great Hackensack Disappearing Act

PART 4

THE GREEN COLOSSUS, 1960–2012

14 The Age of Limits

15 The Big Apple Biome

16 The Future of New York

Appendixes

A Note on Sources

Historical Geographic Information Systems Sources

Art Credits

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

For the folks at 603 East Ninety-Fourth (1940–1973)

Excepting Rippy

New York City was the beneficiary but the victim of its geography.

—Raymond Moley, 1970

INTRODUCTION

For an unparalleled nature adventure, head for the Island of Many Hills. This place lives up to its name with 573 prominences of one kind or another. But the topography is in some ways the least of the adventure. With fifty-five different ecological communities packed into just twenty-odd square miles, the island is a veritable Garden of Eden. From marine eelgrass meadow to shrub swamp, low salt marsh to brackish intertidal mudflats, blueberry bog thicket to oak-tulip forest, this spot is a living embodiment of the phrase wealth of nature. There are more than twenty ponds and over sixty miles of streams and perhaps as many as three hundred springs gurgling away. There are oysters galore. There are black bears, wolves, mountain lions, whales, and porpoises. There are red-winged blackbirds, American redstarts, red-bellied woodpeckers, clapper rails, and great horned owls. There are, in the sedge department alone, densetuft, oval-leaf, hop, broadleaf, parasol, threeway, Muhlenberg’s, Schweinitz’s, Pennsylvania, and hairy umbrella-sedge. This is Mannahatta: a place we are all four hundred years too late to visit.¹

As it turned out, this landmass on the Atlantic Coast of North America did not become a nature preserve. It emerged instead as an urban giant: the Borough of Manhattan—the heart of one of the most drastically transformed natural environments in the world. New York is the most populous city in the United States and has been for the last two centuries. In 1609, less than 1 percent of the Manhattan landscape showed evidence of human influence. By the early twenty-first century, 97 percent of the land had been converted to buildings, sidewalks, parking lots, streets, recreational areas, and other artifacts of civilization. The dominant species by this time was, of course, neither the oyster nor the mountain lion but Homo sapiens sapiens. Today a stunning 69,464 people per square mile live in Manhattan. And as goes Manhattan, so goes the rest of the New York metropolitan area.²

This book is about the struggle between New York and the natural world. At its core, the story is about how, over centuries, people have come to understand, define, and ultimately transform New York’s land, water, and its plant and animal life. The metropolitan area assumed its current shape by way of a set of contingent decisions. Which is precisely why we want to study its history: to understand how ecological change has made New York what it is today, while acknowledging that, present concerns aside, the past has a logic all its own. The struggle at the center of this story has been overwhelmingly one-sided; a man-bites-dog story, if you will. To cite just one measure, between 1900 and 2010, development had whittled down Staten Island’s monumental 5,099 acres of marsh—wildlands more than a third the size of all Manhattan, filled with night herons, belted kingfishers, dragonflies, and snails—to a fractional existence the size of a mere city park (865 acres).³ Part of the story, too, is that sometimes the dog bit back.

To examine New York is to confront what has always been—in one form or another—a high-density place. The key to appreciating this point is to first understand that New York exists in the estuary of the Hudson River, where freshwater meets the Atlantic Ocean. Estuaries are very special environments and, from an ecological perspective, highly productive ones. They are located at the point where freshwater and salt water join together, and play a role not only as habitat for birds and other wildlife but also in the health of oceans, by filtering water and acting as nursery grounds for fish. They tend to be crammed with life. Estuaries trap nutrients from the adjoining watershed and thus are capable of supplying food to enormous populations of species, from oysters to grasses to waterfowl. Not for nothing is the New York area one of the great stopping points for birds migrating along the Atlantic Flyway, the avian world’s version of an interstate.⁴

The ecological history of New York, then, can be summed up very simply: an estuary with a high natural density was replaced by one with an astonishingly high unnatural (for lack of a better word) density. Human beings overshadow the area, but that has hardly led to the end of nature, as it were. In fact, just the reverse. Though the diversity of the plant and animal world is less encyclopedic than what it was back when Henry Hudson made his famed voyage in 1609, some species—gulls, Phragmites (common reed), various kinds of plankton—have thrived on the disruption caused by squeezing more than 6 percent of the entire population of the nation into one small space. Those who see the swarms of people at Times Square and think New York is an exceptionally dense environment don’t know the half of it.⁵

• • •

There has been a sense that New York’s success as a city was somehow foreordained, that the place was geographically destined for greatness. It is an old idea. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, the author of an epic early-twentieth-century study of Manhattan and its topography, wrote that commerce was naturally attracted to the splendid harbor. More recently, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has offered a more sophisticated analysis. Acknowledging that Gotham’s rise was a multidimensional process, he nevertheless pinpointed the ramifying economic impact of the city’s status as a port, which itself was based on geographic advantages such as proximity to the ocean and a location along the wide and navigable Hudson River. In this case, he writes, geography really was destiny, and the significance of trade and immigration to the early republic ensured that New York would dominate. A recent popular history echoes that conclusion: Geography would prove to be destiny—more, perhaps, than in the history of any other city on earth.⁶

There is little doubting the importance of geography. But it is wrong to view it as static. For New York has undergone profound geographic transformations, especially in the last two centuries. The harbor is hardly one that George Washington (who was inaugurated here), much less Henry Hudson, would recognize. Between the early nineteenth century and 1980, an area of marshland four times the size of the island of Manhattan was destroyed. Nearly three Manhattan Islands’ worth of open water, moreover, was filled, explaining why Upper New York Bay is now only three-quarters the size it was in 1845. Altogether, an area of tidal marsh and underwater land in the Hudson estuary amounting to almost half the size of the five boroughs has been lost to urban development. It is not too much to call New York one giant reclamation project.⁷

Hence, my argument is not that geography is destiny but, in a sense, the reverse. A dense city evolved in the Hudson estuary largely because of the trust in constant population and economic growth—New York’s destiny as articulated by those who have run it.

When the growth fetish began is a little hard to say, but it was almost certainly manifest by the middle of the nineteenth century. By that point, the idea that progress rested on what one historian has called a condition of never-ending growth had taken root more broadly in the nation. Eventually this fascination with expansion would come to inform the thinking of New York’s boosters as they vied to shake off the restraining grip of the natural world and reshape relations with land and sea. And this faith in the virtues of the onward march of progress continues to weigh heavily on the minds of those who rule the city. Growth, professor of urban planning Tom Angotti put it recently, is always presumed to be good, even in a Manhattan that is already densely packed with buildings and has little breathing room. That said, I am not unsympathetic to the importance of economic advancement. What inspires me instead is the necessity to accurately depict the consequences of growth for the region’s ecological fabric.⁸

• • •

Historians of New York have tended to see natural forces as a backdrop to what they consider the more important matters of politics and economics. Even the most comprehensive historical works seem to view the natural environment as little more than a preface to the tale of New York’s rise from trading post to metropolis to megalopolis. And yet, crusades to control nature are as central to New York’s history as battles are to the Civil War. Driving the Grand Central Parkway near La Guardia Airport, you might never know that you are passing by Meadow Lake, a man-made body of water that was once a prodigious salt marsh carved up by rivers and sporting panicled expanses of green cordgrass. That was before a war was waged to fend off the sea and make way for the appropriately named lake—New York City’s largest. The reinvention of a marsh as a lake gives us an inkling of the task this book takes up. We must examine how the landscape changed, who was responsible for those changes, and what environmental and social impacts grew out of them. The population density of the New York metropolitan area, after all, rests on a set of ecological imperatives such as the need for water and a place to discharge all the waste produced when millions of people live side by side. What happens in Vegas may stay there, but the same does not hold true for New York.⁹

Gotham Unbound forgoes the tidy political watersheds that have defined the study of this great city and emphasizes a new set of turning points. Not simply the shift from Dutch to English rule, but the market in underwater land is what concerns me in Part 1. This was a development that not only betrayed the colonists’ approach to the natural world but also set the stage for the far more massive efforts to reshape the region and profit off the land that came later.

Part 2 places considerable emphasis on the 1811 grid plan, which was indeed a major change that built on the earlier underwater history of Manhattan Island while laying the groundwork for the high-density living that would come to define the region. Altogether, the grid, the development of an off-island water supply, and other trends associated with the quest for limitless growth combined to cause the most radical alteration of the waters of New York Harbor in recorded history.

What the transformation of the harbor was to the nineteenth century, the makeover of wetlands was to the hundred years that followed. Once marshlands dominated the waterfront from Long Island on the east to the Hackensack Meadowlands on the west—little more than wind blowing across these sweeping expanses of grass. Probing the fate of the marshlands in the shadow of one of the densest urban agglomerations in the world is the subject of Part 3.

Then the fourth and final part explores the period since 1960 as the environmental movement began to blossom. It focuses on the limits to growth in a metropolis long defined by rampant development and ends with Hurricane Sandy. In sum, Gotham Unbound tells the story of New York over the last four centuries from the ground up, a vantage point that reveals a world of change and dislocation that is otherwise difficult to discern.

I freely admit that it is a little hard to define exactly where this book takes place. My main concern is with New York Harbor, broadly construed, and the land surrounding it. Starting with Manhattan and using the coordinates found on a compass, this means that I will examine the expanse stretching from as far east as Jones Beach on Long Island, as far west as the Meadowlands, and as far south as the edge of the New York Bight—the shallow water extending seaward from where the coasts of New York and New Jersey meet to the edge of the continental shelf. To sum up in a word or two this far-reaching tidal network of marshes, rivers, and bays—the habitats mainly dealt with below—is a tall order. I simply call it Greater New York.¹⁰

Rather than offer a comprehensive portrait of all that has happened across this vast terra infirma, I aim instead to simply make New York a less familiar proposition—to show that there is much still to know and understand about a place that many think they know so well. Put somewhat differently, without the changes described in this study, Fresh Kills today would be a wetland and not a mountain chain. Without them, people might be fishing the pond in lower Manhattan or donning waders to walk along the aptly named Water Street. Flushing Meadows would be a meadow instead of the city’s largest lake, Coney Island a real island, and the Meadowlands a place people think of for its snapping turtles and the whistling call of osprey, not for its football or harness racing.

• • •

It might be tempting to write off New York Harbor’s ecological history as a simple tale of decline and fall. But that would be inaccurate. There is no question that, by the 1920s, the harbor had reached a nadir in terms of the oxygen saturation necessary to sustain marine life and that, later on, Staten Island’s Fresh Kills was buried under several colossal mountains of garbage. But the waters have since recovered to a great extent, and Fresh Kills, now no longer a landfill, is being turned into a city park. By the 1970s, herons and egrets had returned to the gritty Arthur Kill separating Staten Island and New Jersey, one of the most industrialized areas of the entire harbor. Today seal-watching cruises depart from Rockaway, Queens.¹¹

So I am not contending that the Big Apple has the biggest ecological problems in the world.¹² My focus instead is on relationships: on the link between new ways of understanding land, especially underwater land, and the changing geography of the city; on the transcendence of the local water supply and the decline in marine life; on the rise of a vision of New York as an infinite proposition and the quest to encroach on the sea; on the relationship between the overproduction of waste and the making of urban mountains; and of course on the link between the present shape of the metropolitan area and the past. An ecological history of New York can help us see that it is wrong to take the city for granted but right to question how the landscape we see driving along the Belt Parkway or strolling along the Hudson River came to be.

These connections are important to recognize because it seems fair to say, as at least one writer has, that today comparatively few New Yorkers realize that they are living in the estuary of the Hudson River.¹³ This lack of knowledge is perhaps understandable in a place known to many as a concrete jungle. Why would contemporary New Yorkers think of themselves as residents in an environment where river and ocean meet when so much of that environment—its smooth cordgrass, fiddler crabs, marsh hens—has been overshadowed by monumental building exploits? And yet there is nothing natural or inevitable about the lapse. Understanding the forces that have made New York what it is will not only place the city in a new light. It will illuminate how this estrangement from the natural world came about. An ecological history has the potential to reconnect people not just with the past but also with the natural environment as it exists today.

It can also change how we think about the future. By midcentury, the projection is that seven out of every ten people on earth will live in a city. Urbanization is remaking landscapes across the globe and playing out with particular force in estuaries, where the bulk of the largest cities in the world are located. Moreover, New York, like other sister cities located in tidal environments, must face up to the realities of climate change. It is more than a little ironic that the celebration of New York’s ecological virtues—as a dense city with less per capita energy use than rural areas—has occurred concurrently with grim forecasts about its vulnerability to extreme weather. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 made it clear that the threat is real. Historians are not in the business of prediction, but exploring ecological history, which studies humankind’s struggle with natural constraints, is a uniquely good way to begin a discussion about the future of the world’s first megacity.¹⁴

In the depths of the fiscal crisis back in the 1970s, the critic Gilbert Millstein wrote that New York was still the scale on which all other cities must be measured, precisely because of the destruction it has wreaked on itself, precisely because of the insane, unbalanced behavior of those who run it, tear it down and build it and decide what shall happen to it. And it remains such a yardstick today. For all the oceans of ink spilled on New York, we have yet to fully understand the environmental transformation that underwrote what is one of the most creative acts of vandalism ever perpetrated on a natural landscape.¹⁵

PART 1

UNDER WATER

1609–1789

1ENTREPÔT

When we say that Henry Hudson explored New York, what we really mean is that he explored lost New York. The bulk of the landscape that Hudson saw on his 1609 visit has vanished—erased by storms, wave action, rising sea level, and the transformation of the land and waterscape. The changes have been so vast and thoroughgoing that it is not even possible to pinpoint with certainty where Hudson ventured on his travels.

Much of what we know about Hudson’s expedition to New York comes from the journal of an officer on the vessel, one Robert Juet of London. On September 2, 1609, the Half Moon arrived, as best we can tell, at a point to the east of Sandy Hook, a barrier spit jutting north along the coast of New Jersey and guarding Lower New York Bay’s southerly entrance. Here the crew found what Juet described as drowned Land, which made it to rise like Ilands. It was an apt description in light of geological history. New York Harbor is sometimes described in the scientific literature as a drowned estuary, a shallow arm of the sea fed by the Hudson River that was literally swamped by the rise in water level that came with the melting of the glaciers. When the last ice sheet began its retreat about twelve thousand years ago, a ridge of rock and sediment was left behind spanning Staten Island and Long Island. Meltwater from the retiring glacier eventually perforated the ridge to produce a narrow channel, eventually named for the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, who dropped anchor there in 1524. As the so-called Wisconsin glacier withdrew, its waters ran off to fill glacial lakes Hackensack and Flushing, giant old bodies of water that became marshes as the rise in sea level slowed down about five thousand years ago.¹

Riding at anchor off Sandy Hook, Juet spied what he took to be three great Rivers. One of them was the Verrazano Narrows. A second, bona fide river off to the west was the Raritan. At an earlier time, the Raritan had hosted the primordial Hudson River as it flowed along a much different path toward the sea than it does today. The third so-called river, and the closest one at hand to the ship, was actually Rockaway Inlet. It was located at the western end of a peninsula formed as wind and wave action channeled sediment west along Long Island’s coast, a process known as littoral drift. We know the identity of Juet’s rivers thanks to the work of Douglas Hunter, a writer and seasoned sailor who in the twenty-first century set out to trace Hudson’s path. Hunter relied on soundings recorded by Juet during the 1609 voyage. These are measurements of the ocean’s depth using a weighted and measured line. The soundings guided a ship in the days when mariners were as yet unable to establish longitude and when even latitude readings taken with a cross staff were subject to error. Hunter used the soundings in conjunction with old nautical charts to re-create the explorer’s itinerary. What he discovered was that Henry Hudson probably began his visit to the region in Brooklyn, not too far from present-day Flatbush Avenue.²

Entering Rockaway Inlet, the Half Moon encountered Jamaica Bay. Juet recorded seeing many Salmons, and Mullets, and Rayes, very great, though the mention of salmon has raised some eyebrows and caused a biologist to conclude instead that the men had found weakfish or sea trout. The next day, if Hunter is correct in his sleuthing, the Half Moon ventured farther into the bay, where the crew discovered an island that later would be called Beeren Eylant, Dutch for Bear Island. According to Juet’s account, some of the crew then went on Land with our Net to Fish, and caught ten great Mullets, of a foot and a halfe long a peece, and a Ray as great as foure men could hale into the ship. What the men thought of Jamaica Bay itself we do not know. But the bay back in Hudson’s time looked much different than it does today now that its tidal wetlands—extending across more than twenty-five square miles as late as 1907—have been filled to construct, among other things, John F. Kennedy International Airport. Even Beeren Eylant (later called Barren Island) is gone, absorbed into Long Island. By 1970, the marshlands were just a shadow of their former existence, reduced by at least 75 percent.³

The salt marshes of Jamaica Bay, teeming with plant and animal life, had themselves only arrived on the scene a few thousand years before Hudson himself—yesterday in geological time. They were the product of a more stabilized set of sea level conditions. One archaeologist has called such marshlands one of the most productive landforms in the world, rivaling intensive agricultural lands in food productivity.⁴

It is not surprising that Hudson stumbled upon native people living in such a bounteous environment. Because the bulldozing of the landscape has swept away much of the archaeological record, the Canarsie Indians, part of a broader Algonquian-speaking people named the Lenape, are difficult for us to fathom. Huge, heaping mounds of shells found on Long Island suggest that, like the other Indians of this region, they were a coastal people, though when Juet encountered the Canarsie, he found them in possession of a great store of Maiz, or Indian Wheate, whereof they make good Bread. Juet’s journal entry notwithstanding, maize, beans, and squash probably did not play as important a role for them as it did for other Native American groups in the Northeast. The rock-strewn and sandy soil would have discouraged agriculture, as did a diverse array of habitats (open ocean, salt and freshwater marshes, mudflats, meadows, and forest) that placed prolific food sources near at hand. The Lenape likely viewed horticulture as peripheral to their diet, though this did not mean that they lacked a rootedness and attachment to place, as even Hudson’s crew was starting to learn.⁵

In their peregrinations about New York Harbor, the crew of the Half Moon came well equipped for estuarine travel. The ship itself was a form of vlieboat—the Vlie being the medieval name for the estuary of the river IJssel. More precisely, the boat was what the Dutch called a jaght, a word that means hunter and the root of the English word yacht. The Half Moon also stowed a smaller ship’s boat, which Hudson decided should be sent out on September 6 to sound the other River, being foure leagues from us. That River was evidently the Verrazano Narrows. Hudson chose John Colman, an Englishman and veteran of an earlier Hudson voyage, to lead the expedition and instructed him to take four crewmembers along. They departed west along the south shore of Long Island past Coney Island, which was still an actual island back then. They then steered through the Narrows and ultimately emerged in Upper New York Bay. Soon after, they crossed into a narrow River to the Westward, between two Ilands. In other words, they proceeded down the Kill Van Kull, a tidal strait separating Staten Island from Bergen Neck in New Jersey. The men saw lands that were pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees as ever they had seene. They pressed on until they came upon an open Sea known to us today as Newark Bay. Beyond the bay stretched the Hackensack and Newark Meadows, the former named for a Lenape group, the latter for the Connecticut Puritans’ New Ark of the Covenant.⁶

These tidal wetlands once extended over forty-two square miles; the Indians called them the Great Marsh, or Mankachkewachky. At the time Colman and the others arrived, an Atlantic white cedar swamp blanketed about a third of the land.I It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the multitude of life-forms that inhabited this place: spoonbills waded in shallow waters; coots plucked away at wild rice that flanked the edges of streams; shad, carp, perch, suckers, sunfish, and pike swarmed through the rivers; lobsters crawled across sandy bottoms feeding on crabs and mussels; the loud gobbling call of wild turkey reverberated through the woods; mountain lions, bears, deer, wolves, and foxes roved the uplands while bald eagles, falcons, and hawks soared overhead.⁷

It was a stunning landscape, and the last one John Colman ever saw. Later, a group of Indians attacked the crew and Colman wound up with an Arrow shot into his throat.⁸

The men eventually escaped and brought Colman’s body back to be buried at a point named in his memory. But exactly where the grave was dug, nobody can say. The Half Moon prepared to leave Rockaway Inlet and on September 10 cruised toward the Verrazano Narrows, passing Coney Island, a place arguably named, assuming various Dutch and English corruptions of language, for the departed Colman.⁹

On the following day, after coming through the Narrows, the crew dropped anchor and saw that it was a very good Harbour for all windes. The Half Moon had arrived in Upper New York Bay. Like Jamaica Bay, it was a lot roomier back then. Off on the west side, the men might have seen mudflats that eventually came to be called the Jersey Flats. Hoboken would have been little more than an island at high tide, having yet to be reclaimed as part of the mainland. Nor had Gowanus Bay been filled in with the remains of a bluff, a change Walt Whitman would later lament. Lower Manhattan looked more like a peninsula than the bulbous landmass it is today.¹⁰

The Half Moon had voyaged into a world not simply of mudflats, wetlands, bays, and deep-water habitats, but a place with an unrivaled biota. In Henry Hudson’s day, oysters and grasses, not people, crowded the estuary that would come to bear his name. Hundreds of square miles of oyster beds dominated the harbor, making it one of the world’s greatest collections of filter feeders (a species that feeds by straining out waterborne suspended matter such as plankton). The bivalve’s inescapable presence would eventually be etched right into the landscape from Oyster Island in Upper New York Bay to Oyster Bay in Long Island Sound to Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, named after the pile of oyster shells the Indians left behind.¹¹

The grasses of New York were even more prolific. The crew on board the Half Moon would have discovered tall, bright green expanses of salt marsh cordgrass, giving off a sulfurous odor that mingled with the briny smell of the sea. This perennial grass species has few competitors in the intertidal zone because it evolved to deal effectively with the high fluctuations in salinity found in this environment. Behind it, on higher, drier terrain, the men found shorter stands of salt meadow hay with its purple flowers and its stems bent into cowlicks by the wind. And beyond that, yet more sod as far as the eye could see: spike grass, switchgrass, rushes. Grass was everywhere, even underwater where eelgrass flourished, creating a habitat for everything from sea horses to sea turtles. Henry Hudson had chanced upon an extraordinarily rich and productive natural environment.¹²

From the days of Henry Hudson to those of George Washington, some 150 years later, coastal New York likely remained a largely intact set of ecosystems with some localized depletions. There was only one exception to this generalization: lower Manhattan, or Manna-hatta, to use Juet’s name for the area. The spot of earth that would evolve into the linchpin of the global economy underwent intensive change from a place organized mainly around harvesting marine life to one that quickly assumed a new status as an entrepôt. A place notable for its natural wealth went on to distinguish itself as a place in the business of producing riches of a different sort. The change happened under the leadership of the Dutch, a people who embraced some quintessentially modern economic ideas.¹³

• • •

Not for nothing is the word landscape of Dutch origin. In the late sixteenth century, the United Provinces rose to become the world capital of landscape change. This happened at the same time that the Dutch overtook Spain to reign over the global capitalist economy. The Dutch had their work cut out for them. Nearly half the land area of the Netherlands would be swamped if not for the system of dikes built to defend the country from river and sea. So as the Dutch etched out their political identity, they got down in the muck and took control over their ecological destiny as well. For two thousand years, the Dutch had battled the marshes, and the marshes had won. But beginning in the fifteen hundreds, as the Dutch Golden Age began, the mud workers broke out their pumps and set about reclaiming two hundred thousand acres of land. The high point came in the period between 1600 and 1625, just as the city of New Amsterdam across the Atlantic was getting off the ground. Don’t fight the sea with brute force but with soft persuasion, intoned Andries Vierlingh, the hydraulic engineer and dike master to William the Silent. The Dutch had persuaded a whole new landscape into existence, and now they headed west to try their hand abroad.¹⁴

In the wake of Hudson’s voyage, the English sea captain Samuel Argall paid a visit to Manhattan. Hudson’s discovery briefly seemed in jeopardy, but then the Dutch, under the auspices of the West India Company, took over. Chartered in 1621, after the Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain ended, the West India Company was charged with containing the spread of Catholicism while vying with the Spanish for commercial dominance. The company would soon dispatch ships to North America and, though the evidentiary record is not entirely clear, it seems as if a ship named the Eendracht arrived there with a small number of colonists in 1624. In an effort to lay claim to as much territory as possible, the vessel dispatched settlers along the South River (Delaware River), the Fresh River (Connecticut River), and the North River (Hudson). On the lower Hudson, the colonists disembarked at a place they called Nooten Eylandt, or nut island, because of its oak, hickory, and chestnut trees. Today it is known as Governors Island.¹⁵

The following year, the company appointed Willem Verhulst as the colony’s director. He was instructed to round up the colonists into one main settlement, presumably to serve as a military and commercial hub for the company’s far-flung trading network. Many people, including the company’s officers, its chief farmers, and skippers, participated in the decision. The company directors back at headquarters in the Netherlands voiced the opinion that the best place for a fort was where the river is narrow, where it cannot be fired upon from higher ground, where large ships cannot come too close, where there is a distant view unobstructed by trees or hills, where it is possible to have water in the moat, and where there is no sand, but clay or other firm earth. They suggested three possibilities: High Island on the South River, a spot not far from where Trenton, New Jersey, is today; the west side of the North River (or Jersey City, roughly speaking); or the hook of the Manattes. Verhulst was also warned in making the choice to see that the place chosen is well provided with water and with timber for fuel and building, and that the rivers thereabout are full of fish. Evidently Verhulst was not a particularly likable fellow. Before he could proceed too far with the consolidation plan, he was replaced by Peter Minuit. Minuit is of course legendary for having (as reported in a 1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen) purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders. The directors, perhaps not surprisingly, given their lack of firsthand knowledge of this part of the world, got their third choice.¹⁶

The gaps in the historical record make it impossible to say definitively why Nooten Eylandt was abandoned for another larger island first mapped by the Dutch trader Adriaen Block as Manhates. We can, however, draw inferences. By the spring of 1626, the Dutch colonists at Fort Orange (Albany, New York) became embroiled in a battle with the Mohawks that left Daniel van Crieckenbeeck, the commander of the fort, dead. The news of the disastrous attack made its way down the Hudson and prompted Minuit to send a letter, dated May 11, 1626, to one Pieter Barentsz, instructing him to proceed to Fort Orange to take control in Van Crieckenbeeck’s absence. It seems plausible that Minuit, fearing an all-out battle with the Indians, felt compelled to gather the settlers dispersed at Fort Orange and to the south on tiny High Island (Hooghe Eylandt) in the Delaware River into one central location. He likely was inclined toward an island because of its military advantages and even better if there was room to spread out. However it happened, the decision would put Manhattan on the map.¹⁷

• • •

Having selected a location, the Dutch, under orders from Amsterdam not to stoop to force or fraud, proceeded to make one of the most famous transactions in world history. Some have tried to establish whether the sixty-guilder sum employed to purchase Manhattan (eventually reckoned, in the nineteenth century, it is believed, as twenty-four dollars) represented a fair valuation. Others have come to dismiss the issue of computing the island’s worth as beside the point because the Indians had no choice. Had the Indians not sold Manhattan to the Dutch, writes one historian, the inevitable rise in the English population in the area later in the seventeenth century, driven by the advantages of New York as a harbor, would have put steadily mounting pressure on the Indians to sell.¹⁸

The real issue here is less the inevitability of New York City based on its natural attributes or the morality of the exchange. It is instead the two very different systems for organizing relations with the land that came into conflict as the European settlement developed. As best as anyone can tell, the idea of selling land would never have occurred to the Indians. A Dutch visitor to New Netherland named Adriaen van der Donck (of whom more in a moment) put his finger on one of the key features of the Indian land regime: their belief in collective stewardship. To the Indians, wind, stream, bush, field, sea, beach, and riverside are open and free to everyone of every nation with which the Indians are not embroiled in open conflict. An archaeologist who has studied land transactions between the Lenape and the colonists found that the Indians practiced a form of land tenure founded on temporary usufructuary rights rather than permanent title. This is an understanding of ownership based on the idea of mutual rights to harvest the bounty of the land. The colonists, meanwhile, had a different idea. They had come to embrace the notion of private property, a concept that turned the land into a commodity.¹⁹

It is important not to present too stark a picture of the differences between the Indians and the colonists on the matter of land ownership. Both groups held the land in trust: the Lenape in the name of the Great Spirit, Kishelemukunk; the colonists in the name of God. Both also recorded the transactions: the Lenape with wampum, the colonists with deeds. And both, despite the innovation of private property, shared in the experience of communal rights to the land—an agrarian custom known in Europe as the commons. Further, in light of the Manhattan-for-twenty-four-dollars debate, it is instructive to note that the Indians seem to have initially accepted relatively low prices for their land, perhaps hoping to establish a reciprocal relationship that would obligate the colonists to provide them with short-term protection. This strategy, it has been argued, helped the Lenape to fend off complete subjugation for almost a century and a half.²⁰

With respect to the land, the date 1638 has retreated into the shadows of history, and yet it is arguably as important if not more so than what happened in 1626. The former date marks the year when the institution of real property surfaced in Manhattan. The new director general, Willem Kieft, a merchant, arrived to issue the first land patent, or grond-brieven, to Andries Hudde for one hundred morgens of land in Harlem.II The idea of land patents was not something Kieft dreamed up on his own. Private ownership of land was a custom with which settlers coming from the urbanized world of the Netherlands would have been intimately familiar. That it took over a decade after settlement for land patents to be issued suggests what an utterly fragile affair the entire New Amsterdam enterprise was during its early years. With the granting of the first patents, the Dutch colonists received the legal right to sell, lease, and bequeath the land. They also found themselves charged with improving the lots on penalty of forfeiture. It would be some years before John Locke published a work that spelled out a formal theory of property, but, in essence, the Dutch had taken a page straight out of the Englishman’s book.²¹

• • •

As the colonists set about making history in this new land, their thoughts—not surprisingly, given their country of origin—turned to water. We have seen how the West India Company sent its settlers out to the major waterways of the region. Minuit had originally been summoned to New Netherland not to replace Verhulst but to survey rivers and size up the prospects for settlement. Unused to clearing forests and likely intimidated by the lush old-growth oaks, chestnuts, and hemlocks that carpeted perhaps three-quarters of Manhattan, the Dutch flocked to the more familiar marshy terrain. They settled the wetlands of southern Manhattan, a place that the Mohawk called Gänóno, or place of reeds. In 1636 they colonized the tidal inlet and saltwater marsh at Gowanus. Ten years later, they founded Breucklen, named after a Dutch town famous for its brooks. In 1645 Vlissingen, after a town in the Netherlands, was incorporated on what would come to be the Flushing Meadows. In 1654 they peopled the marshland near Jamaica Bay with its prized salt meadow hay, ideal for forage, establishing Middlewout, later called Vlachte Bos, or Flatbush. In 1658 they voyaged to a marsh on the eastern part of Manhattan Island’s northernmost reaches and named it Nieuw Haarlem. In 1671 they set off to establish Nieu Dorp (New Town) near the Great Kills, a wetland on Staten Island. It was as if the Dutch sought to comfort themselves in this new world with scenes reminiscent of their Fatherland.²²

Nevertheless, the southern part of Manhattan facing New York Bay remained at the center of Dutch ambitions. To this place, a newly minted lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck journeyed in May 1641. He set sail across the ocean aboard a ship named Den Eyckenboom (the Oak Tree), en route to govern the vast landholdings along the Hudson River of the diamond merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer. When Van der Donck arrived, New Amsterdam was about to undergo a renaissance of sorts. Until this point, the city had been best known for its barroom brawls and prostitutes, a lawless trading post in a colony run by an imperious private company. But in 1639 the Dutch States General approved a new set of provisions that forced the West India Company to relinquish its monopoly on trade. The move opened the floodgates of the free market, making Amsterdam’s private merchants eager in anticipation. As a result, a burgeoning merchant elite began to consider New Amsterdam home, and the city took a more assertive approach toward the land.²³

Thought to have been drawn about 1670, this map is a copy of a 1639 map showing the settlements around what became New York Harbor.

Sometime before 1643, the Dutch settlers of Manhattan undertook their first drainage project. A wetland they called Blommaert’s Vly occupied the southern tip of the island. A little brook meandered through it. Using the brook to get a head start on the project, the colonists dug two canals to drain the boggy land, acting in the spirit of an old proverb that went, "dien water deert, die water keert meaning if water hurts you, you may turn it away. The settlers called the larger, main canal (approximating the course of today’s Broad Street) the Heere Gracht. A smaller canal built as a spur was christened the Prinzen Gracht. Both were named after conduits in Amsterdam and translate as the Gentleman’s (Herengracht) and Prince’s (Prinsengracht) canals. Built in the early seventeenth century, the Amsterdam canals formed part of a complex development project that sought to marry sea power to the urban landscape. More specifically, the canals reclaimed land for purposes of housing developments designed to appeal to those who had struck it rich during the Dutch Golden Age. Their considerably less elegant counterparts in the New World served less ambitious but nonetheless important ends. The New Amsterdam watercourses transformed a marsh in lower Manhattan into land suitable for a sheep pasture. Equally important, the canals furthered transportation around the small city by allowing small vessels, at high tide at least, to enter into the town from the harbor. As one historian has written, the waterways brought the waterfront deep into the settlement."²⁴

Van der Donck ignored the New Amsterdam canals in a book he wrote in 1656 describing New Netherland. But he did pay special attention to the topography of this new land. What struck him were New Amsterdam’s wetlands, some so big that one cannot see across them. Van der Donck was especially impressed by the double formation of New York’s coastline. There he looked out at islands or barrier beaches, beyond which lie spacious marshes, waterways, and creeks, many of them navigable and affording convenient passage from one place to another. Then there were the major rivers. The North River carries most of the trade and commerce and was already well populated by the time that Van der Donck wrote. In the river, he came across sturgeon, rockfish, black bass, and sheepshead. He also mentioned whales, which on one occasion apparently managed to travel far upstream from the ocean by taking advantage of the wedge of salt water that runs up the Hudson. One wayward animal beached forty-three miles from the sea and was turned into so much train oil (a word that comes from Dutch for tear and referenced the extraction of the oil in droplets). On the eastern side of New Amsterdam, there was the East River. Some settlers correctly perceived that this was not a river at all but a bay (in reality, a tidal strait) that connected two parts of the ocean. River or bay, as one pleases, it is one of the best, commodious, and commendable attributes a country could be desired to have, Van der Donck observed. The East River brimmed with bays, harbors, creeks, inlets, rivers, and other places, in such number on both the island and the inland that we should be unable to find its match in the Netherlands.²⁵

Tremendous diversity of species and large wildlife populations characterized the world Van der Donck encountered. The landscape was as densely packed as it is today, but with plants and animals, not towers and people. Van der Donck wrote of beaver, a keystone species, which meant that it shaped the environment and the possibilities for other organisms to a degree out of proportion to its own numbers. The large beaver population thrived in all the freshwater swamps and bogs spread throughout the island. Van der Donck also happened upon a place rich in fish such as shad and sturgeon, which migrate up rivers to spawn, and a great range of avian life including eagles, falcons, hawks, sandhill cranes, herons, bitterns, pileated woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, and passenger pigeons, the last nesting together in enormous numbers of countless thousands. He marveled at the waterfowl, the whistling swans, Canada geese, pintails, widgeons, loons, cormorants, and shovelers. He glimpsed seals, tuna, and dolphins, and uncovered estuaries overrun with mussels, clams, and oysters—a world of incredible abundance that offered a stark contrast with the depleted coastal ecosystems of Europe where people had relentlessly fished the inshore for over six hundred years.²⁶

It was, above all, the potential utility of nature, as one historian has written, that most excited Dutch visitors like Van der Donck, especially the navigational prospects of the harbor. The North and East Rivers, after all, flowed into yet another bay. Not just any bay, but a place preeminently known as The Bay. Its fame rested on several factors. Multiple waterways, apart from the North and East Rivers, emptied into New York Bay, including the Raritan River, the Kill Van Kull, and the Navesink River. A further reason for its fame is that this bay can easily provide berthing protected from all dangerous winds to more than a thousand cargo ships. A wide entrance welcomed visiting ships; on a single tide vessels could sail several miles straight to New Amsterdam. To the Lenape, the estuary was a gift of simple abundance. To the Dutch, who judged any land in relation to its rivers and bays, New Amsterdam was God’s gift to maritime commerce, an activity at which the Dutch had come to excel by the middle of the sixteenth century.²⁷

• • •

Naturally enough, trends in the Netherlands shaped the Dutch approach to New York Harbor. In the half century following 1570, Dutch trade evolved away from inland waterways toward the expansion of harbors to accommodate international trade. By the second third of the seventeenth century, New York Harbor too was in the throes of a dramatic reorientation as it gravitated toward a new existence as an entrepôt and away from its long history as a place valued chiefly for its marine life. This is not to say that the Dutch turned their backs on the ecological bounty they found in New Amsterdam’s marine environment. As early as 1658, the productivity of the oyster reefs surrounding Manhattan had degraded enough to precipitate what may have been New York’s first conservation ordinance barring all persons from continuing to dig or dredge any Oyster shells on the East River or on the North River. But there is no doubt that, by the 1650s, New Amsterdam had become an increasingly important point in a sweeping transatlantic trading network. The growth of the slave-based Caribbean sugar plantations set the stage for New Amsterdam’s emergence as a convenient entrepôt for the slave trade in North America and a source of vital supplies for the plantation economies developing to the south. It would be hard to overstate the importance—much less the stunning environmental implications—of the reconceptualization of New Amsterdam from coastal cornucopia to port.²⁸

Across the ocean, the burgeoning Atlantic economy helped to underwrite rapid urban growth in Holland and Zeeland during the Dutch Golden Age and inspired some to envision great possibilities for New Amsterdam. Visitors such as Van der Donck argued that the old Netherlands and the new one were cut from the same ecological mold, implying that they would chart similar economic destinies. The two places bore, he offered, a striking likeness in opportunity for trade, seaports, watercourses, fisheries, weather, and wind. In large part, Van der Donck surmised, the similarities stemmed from natural predisposition. But he also hazarded, There is scope for man-made improvements in many places.²⁹

These improvements began under the leadership of Petrus (Peter) Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland from 1647 through 1664. In the 1630s, the West India Company had stationed Stuyvesant in Curaçao, where he oversaw the mushrooming Dutch commodities trade. He later rose to acting governor of the Lesser Antilles and in 1645—after losing a leg to a Spanish cannonball—director-general of New Netherland. Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam in May 1647. Two months later, he made clear his intention to orient the city around the commercial potential of its waterfront. He authorized an excise tax to pay for a Pier for the convenience of the Merchants and Citizens and a bulkhead to ward off erosion along the East River. He would later go on to reclaim vacant riverine lots from the water and morass in order to build a new residence. Stuyvesant seemed bent on reshaping the New Amsterdam landscape after its Dutch namesake.³⁰

In the 1650s, as the city evolved from a company town into an independent municipality, New Amsterdam’s economic center of gravity shifted more toward the waterfront. By turns erratic and tyrannical, Stuyvesant, who once threatened to make anyone who appealed his dictates a foot shorter, and send the pieces to Holland, ran into opposition from Van der Donck, who favored a more decentralized form of government. Although Stuyvesant responded to the criticism by banishing Van der Donck from the colony, the increasingly embattled West India Company forced Stuyvesant to form a municipal government in 1652. Emboldened perhaps by its new legal status, the city began widening the Heere Gracht and lining it with wooden sheathing to keep the sides from caving in, a project designed to internalize the waterfront within the city and make it even more accessible to navigation by small boats. The authorities also approved a new municipal pier at the southern tip of Manhattan and remodeled the City Tavern, a gathering spot built to emulate Amsterdam’s Stadts Herbergh. The building became the Stadhuis, or city hall, and a more solid monument to government—literally—as workers excavated earth from a nearby hill to fill in the space between the structure and the water. In a sign of the waterfront’s new significance for economic life, the city hall’s main entrance was relocated to the East River side of the building.³¹

The rise of New Amsterdam’s waterfront in the 1650s, it turned out, was inauspiciously timed to coincide with a new era of increasing pressure on Dutch commercial hegemony. The year 1652 marked the start of the First Anglo-Dutch War and the beginning of a quarter century of attacks on the maritime supremacy of the United Provinces, a trend that eventually resulted in England’s conquest of New Netherland and the transformation of New Amsterdam into New York.³²

While British mercantilism by the early 1660s had thrown the Dutch on the defensive economically (by requiring that only English ships be employed in the Atlantic trade to England), James, Duke of York, the brother of the newly restored king, Charles II, salivated over the prospect of replacing the Netherlands at the helm of Europe’s trading empire. The English had already been busy colonizing the vicinity around New Amsterdam. Earlier in 1656, Stuyvesant had made peace with the Indians of western Long Island and, while Dutch settlement increased shortly thereafter, ultimately it was the English who benefited. By the 1660s, the English had established thirteen settlements on that island, compared to only five for the Dutch; the Indians had been driven from what is today Kings and Queens Counties. Then, in 1664, Charles II gave his brother what is certainly one of the largest gifts in history: a huge expanse from the Connecticut River to Delaware Bay, throwing in parts of Maine, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Long Island for good measure. With the gift, New Amsterdam’s geopolitical importance became paramount. The present, in other words, opened the way for New York to evolve into the seat of British control over the entire stretch of coast spanning from Maine to Cape Fear, North Carolina. It also bolstered New York’s prospects as an entrepôt for supplying the West Indies with slaves and food.³³

Shortly thereafter, British warships under the command of Colonel Richard Nicolls swept into New York Harbor to claim James’s present. Stuyvesant was vastly outmatched and, under pressure from city fathers, capitulated without a fight.³⁴

Even so, Dutch influence over the landscape persisted. The rivers emptying into the Hudson on the western side of what was now New York continued to be called kills as opposed to the English equivalent, brooks. Bays remained reaches. Dutch place names survived, and so too did the canals in southern Manhattan.³⁵

Not until the 1670s did the Heere Gracht finally succumb. Why the English filled in the canal remains something of a mystery. What we do know is that the conduit had become fouled over time. In 1657 a New Amsterdam ordinance prohibited people from throwing rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animal or anything like it into it. No one seems to have paid the law much attention. So another ordinance was soon passed increasing the fine for violating the rule. In the 1660s, the government set about collecting a tax from those with property adjoining the canal to pay for sheeting to repair its walls. Two years later, the money left over was used to finance a lock to keep the canal full and at the ready in the event of fire. Even after the lock went in, the canal was described as very foul and muddy.³⁶

It is conceivable that the watercourse may have deteriorated even further by the 1670s. In 1675, with the British now firmly in control of New York (after repossessing it from the Dutch, who briefly reoccupied the city in 1673), a committee was appointed to oversee the cleansing the great Graft or Ditch. Not long thereafter, the Common Council, the governing body of the city of New York, ordered that people Liueing within the Streete Called Heregraft: Shall forth with & without: delay fill up the graft Ditch. As one historian writing in the early twentieth century put it, Thus, probably with no malice aforethought, the newly created English common council abolished this reminder of the Dutch ‘Vaterland.’ Filling in land under water eventually burgeoned into a fixation for the English colonists.³⁷

Rather than building canals and internalizing the waterfront as the Dutch had, the British focused on extending the existing littoral outward. Major Edmund Andros played an important role in this regard. Appointed governor of New York in 1674, Andros proved eager to enhance New York’s mission as a purveyor of food and supplies to the plantations of the West Indies, and thus did all he could to aid the city’s merchants in monopolizing this trade. He also personally oversaw the building of a proper and truly permanent pier, called the Great Dock. Although there had been two earlier efforts to build rudimentary piers beginning in 1647 and 1659, this was a far more ambitious public works project anticipated to involve eighteen thousand cartloads of stone. According to one report, Andros had plans in the autumn of 1676 to visit John Winthrop, the governor of Connecticut, but chose to delay the trip after having undertaken a great worke of making [a] new wharfe. When completed in November, the imposing stone and timber breakwater formed a near perfect semicircle beginning at Whitehall Street and ending at city hall. A neat little passage at the apex allowed vessels to pass into the now protected harbor.³⁸

By 1684, Andros’s great work, the port of New York, had grown to support a resident fleet of roughly eighty vessels; trade with